David Beito at the Liberty & Power Blog recommends the film The Pursuit of Happyness with Will Smith which is currently in the theatres. He writes: I hereby give Pursuit of Happyness a glowing endorsement. It is a compelling, energetic, and unabashed celebration of free markets, individual responsibility, and old-fashioned pluck. Based on a true
A fascinating interview with playwright/screenwriter/director David Mamet by Charlie Rose (jump to 29:00) features his comments on economics and Hollywood (jump to 36:00). The interview is about his book Bambi Vs. Godzilla: On the Nature, Purpose, and Practice of the Movie Business . He says that he has been studying economics and has been
Learn about more films with libertarian themes at the Mises Film Page . Sophie Scholl: The Final Days (2005) On February 22, 1943, Sophie Scholl, her brother Hans Scholl, and their friend Christoph Probst were beheaded for treason by the Nazi regime. Sophie Scholl was 21. They had committed no violence but had secretly written and distributed
When the U.S. government initially brought an antitrust case against Microsoft in 1998 at the behest of competitors Netscape and Sun, beltway types marvelled that Microsoft did not even have a lobbyist in DC. Somehow this technology company had become a huge corporation without playing the usual political game. Well, Microsoft has matured. (I’ve
Mystery solved. I first heard about the deadly flu pandemic of 1918 in an obscure blues song from that era. As I learned more about it, like that it was the worst pandemic in world history, I wondered why there was relative silence about this horrifying event, relative to, say, World War I and the Great Depression about which any schoolchild
Murray Rothbard noted some years ago, somewhat ruefully, the connection between science fiction and libertarianism in his comments on the “modal libertarian”. But, well, what other genre of literature can be argued is fundamentally libertarian? Eric S. Raymond, known because of his role in the open source movement and his seminal essay The
This film is in theaters now, but unfortunately not for long. Please get out to see this film! This is our story, a libertarian story. See more films about liberty and the state at the film page. Amazing Grace (2007) What could be more opposed to the principle of self-ownership than slavery, an institution that is, very possibly, older than the
Anyone who has read RJ Rummel’s China’s Bloody Century: Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1900 can only wish that the Chinese would get a merciful break after all that. (Except for the neocons who are eager to get a conflict going with China and for whom mercy, I gather, is not a virtue.) A Chinese co-worker recently returned from a visit back home
In If Men Were Angels Robert Higgs analyzes James Madison’s famous passage from The Federalist No. 51 containing the quotable line “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” This is an excellent article with several useful analytical approaches to thinking about the state. Of particular value is a section on the “dynamic
It is a commonplace, for libertarians at least, that coercive redistribution cuts into charity by reducing the funds available for charitable giving. But Arthur C. Brooks, in his book Who Really Cares , points to another effect of redistribution on giving... To be precise, an effect of a belief in redistribution. From an interview with Brooks in
What is the Mises Institute?
The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard.
Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.